Blogs and Web logs

John Naughton, on the dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for Web and writ­ing for print:

The other dif­fer­ence between writ­ing for print and writ­ing for one’s blog is that there comes a moment with the print essay when it has to be ‘fin­ished’ and dis­patched to the sub-editors: there’s an ‘end-point’, in other words. But, in a sense, a blog post is never ‘fin­ished’; there’s always the pos­si­ble of ongo­ing revi­sion in the light of com­ments, or sec­ond thoughts, or sheer, unrea­son­ing loss of nerve. You could say, there­fore, that writ­ing for print is like sculpt­ing in stone, whereas writ­ing for a blog is like sculpt­ing in jelly that hasn’t quite set.

It’s a nice post that also vis­its the dif­fer­ence between blogs and their less-wordy antecedents, Web logs. I’m glad for evi­dence that I’m not the only one to remem­ber the orig­i­nal pur­pose of blogs: to col­lect inter­est­ing links to other places online.

I come back to that def­i­n­i­tion every time I start to feel guilty about not post­ing enough longish pieces to this blog. I rea­son with myself, say­ing that it’s okay to post mostly short posts and links with excerpts. That is, after all, how the found­ing fathers of the blo­gos­phere would have done it.

Still, when I sit down to write a longer text of any kind, I worry that my ten­dency to post short, unre­marked items has eroded my atten­tion span. I worry that every time I sit down with my iPod Touch at night to read or do what­ever rather than read from an actual book.

It’s an old com­plaint, in Web terms, and I know it’s some­thing of an over­stated com­plaint. Yet I try to think back to my time in col­lege as an English stu­dent, read­ing long, un-wired texts for hours at a time with only a pen­cil and a lamp. I try to think about doing that again and I won­der if I could.